Mark Brown is on a well-earned break this week, so I'm keeping a wary eye on arts cuts for him.

There's a good news/bad news event coming up: the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester (Mosi to its friends) is about to have that nice Brian Cox in – in his time off from being a floppy-haired television star, the particle physicist is a professor at Manchester university – to open its new all-singing all-dancing Revolution Manchester gallery.

When the public gets in on Saturday they'll see all manner of whizz-bang interactives and gizmos: what they won't see is the virtual axe hanging over the museum's neck.

The good news is Mosi's visitor numbers have been steadily on the rise, and director Tony Hill hopes to hit 900,000 this year, with the new £9m gallery of the history of invention and innovation in the city, including a working model of the 1948 world's first stored programme computer, and the largest video wall in the UK.

The bad news is Mosi is one of the few outside the major nationals where we already know where the cuts will fall. It's one of seven centrally funded museums – including the Geffrye, Design and Horniman in London, Tyne and Wear archives and museums, and the National Coalmining museum in Yorkshire – which the government wants to cut adrift, or as the DCMS puts it, "is exploring whether the department's non-national museums may be more effectively sponsored through other bodies in the longer term".

Things, as Cox's former band D:Ream might now be tempted to sing, Can Only Get Worser.

Meanwhile a gallery worker – who has asked to remain anonymous as he or she wants to remain a gallery worker – gets in touch to say the good news was David Cameron chose the Whitechapel Gallery in East London – where his wife is soon to be a guest curator for an exhibition from the Government Art Collection – as the venue for his Nordic summit. The bad news was that to accommodate the event and the rigorous security checks, the gallery had to close to the public for the day. Our correspondent wonders if this will be a future cuts solution: "Art institutions should shut their doors to their public and open them to private events."